Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (38/2025): GNOME 49 and a new phone from FuriLabs
Table of Contents
Quite the week: FuriLabs announce a new phone (FLX1s), we had a major GNOME release, a Ubuntu Touch Q&A happened, another collection of Sailfish OS Community News was published, and way, way more. Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- FuriLabs: FLX1s is Launched
- Liliputing: FLX1S is a new Linux phone that's... mostly a downgrade from the FLX1. While loosing some features is sad, having a device that's a lot less chunky and heavy, but has more RAM actually makes me like this change.
- Bobby Borisov: FuriLabs Opens Pre-Orders for FLX1s Linux Phone
- hn: FLX1s phone is launched
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: FLX1S is a new Linux phone that's... mostly a downgrade from the FLX1 - Liliputing
- linuxlinks: Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Waydroid battery life
- lwn: GNOME 49 released
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 18th September 2025 - Issue Reporting
- Jan Wagemakers: shift6mq: postmarketOS installed on SD card (dual boot android)
- Jan Wagemakers: EDL backup of my shift6mq phone
- Purism: PureOS Crimson: August 2025 – Alpha Released
Worth Watching
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 174 Nice one!
- Nostalgitech: My surprise at FOSDEM2025 - FuriPhone FLX1 a 5G Linux Mobile
- 先生陳: #MI 9T #刷機 變 #Postmarketos #linux 用 # Docker 掛載 #Hoomassitant
- Untitled Hacking Company: You Can Put LINUX On this PHONE?
- Laura Malvoyante: 1 week using a Linux Phone | Jolla C2 Community Phone with Sailfish OS
- Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E487: SFOS – Lighthouse, The GUI system monitor
- Dark1 Linux, Tech, Gaming: Ubuntu Touch GPS: The Ultimate Smartphone Achilles Heel? #shorts
- Dark1 Linux, Tech, Gaming: Living Only on Ubuntu Phone for a Week: My Crazy Experience #shorts
- @nostalgitech9669: KDE Plasma Mobile OS - one cool Linux Mobile
- Akademy 2025 - Tuesday BoF Wrap Up - Plasma Mobile
- Bhushan Shah: Plasma Mobile Power Management (Akademy 2025)
Datenspuren (German)
- Marius Melzer: Na endlich: Linux auf dem Smartphone
- Katzenmann: Wie man mit PostmarketOS Linux auf dem Handy benutzt
Worth Noting
- pabloyoyoista: "Do you know some FOSS project that has successfully established a workflow to get help from non-technical contributors? Despite having some successes, we have struggled to scale that work up in #postmarketos and we're looking to do something about it. Any pointers on previous art would be super helpful!https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/-/issues/209"
- sunweaver: "Yesterday I started with reviewing and testing Guido's and Bhushan's meticulous work on #Morph Browser #Qt6. Morph is the #webbrowser that comes with #Lomiri, the #convergent operating environment. The bump of Morph to Qt6 allows us to build Morph against qt6-webengine. For Lomiri users this will be a huge milestone, as it bumps the default browser (chromium) engine provided by #QtWebengine from v87 to v122 (via QtWebengine 6.8.2).", "The new browser version will be provided in Debian experimental and on Launchpad (ppa:lomiri/builds) very soon, uploads to Debian forky/unstable and trixie-backports will follow asap."
- modos: "What if e-ink could be open, fast, and in the hands of every creator? 🤔Thanks to your support, it’s real. 🎉Glider is here: 75 Hz, <100 ms, fully open. Now the real breakthroughs begin with what you build.https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/updates/a-beginning-not-an-end"
- gfxstrand: "Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why? Did you guess AI?…"
- craftyguy: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/7059👀#postmarketos #immutable
- austriancoder: "Fixed Mesa API changes, and clinfo is happy now.Device Name Vivante GC7000 rev 6009Device Vendor VivanteDevice Vendor ID 0Device Version OpenCL 3.0Device Numeric Version 0xc00000 (3.0.0)Driver Version 25.3.0-devel (git-747f2ecccc)#etnaviv #mesa3d"
- Purism community: What are the things you wish you knew when you setup your Librem 5 the first time?
Events
- lugv: "Bad News... 😞Es könnte sein, dass wir dieses Jahr am #LinuxDayAT keine Videoaufzeichnungen machen können.Team Betreuung ist ohnehin schon unterbesetzt und der Hauptverantwortliche für Video fällt vermutlich aus gesundheitlichen Gründen aus.Wir suchen hektisch nach Lösungen, können aber nix garantieren. Personell ist's beim LinuxDay immer recht prekär..."
- fosdem: FOSDEM 2026: 31st January and 1st February https://fosdem.org/2026/news/2025-09-18-fosdem-2026/
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #217 Mahjongg Sundays
- Allan Day: GNOME Foundation Update, 2025-09-19
- Christian Hergert: Fibers in Libdex
- Sebastian Wick: Integrating libdex with GDBus
- Jakub Steiner: HDR Wallpapers
- Phoronix: GNOME 49 Officially Released With Wayland Improvements, Showtime As Video Player
Phosh
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: 6.5 beta and start of the bug-fix-a-palooza
- KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta Release
- Devin Lin: Akademy 2025
- Volker Krause: Akademy 2025
- David Edmunson: Upcoming changes to Activities in Plasma 6.5
- KDE Akademy: Akademy 2025 - KDE at a Turning Point
- Derek Lin: Karton Virtual Machine Manager Blog #4: Hardware Accelerating the SPICE viewer (with OpenGL)
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.5 Preps Yet More Wayland Fixes & Improvements
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta Released With KNightTime, Rounded Bottom Window Corners
Sailfish OS
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 18th September 2025 - Issue Reporting
- #sailfishOS: Pleasantly surprised: with the Tooter ß app for #SailfishOS you can log in not only with multiple #Mastodon accounts at the same time, but even with #Pixelfed. 🎉However, there’s still a bug: opening your own Pixelfed profile makes the app crash and you have to log in again.
- #sailfishOS: @jolla I appreciate the FOSS parts of what you do. I'm not going to give money to the creation of proprietary code though when there are so many fully open projects that also need funding (eg @postmarketOS who I have no affiliation with).If you one day have a crowdfunding campaign to fully open the proprietary parts of your code, I will be very happy to contribute!#SailfishOS #FOSS
Ubuntu Touch
- linuxlinks: Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Waydroid battery life
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 174 call for questions
- UBports - Development - Issues: 5.0.5 release forgot to bump CMake version variables
- UBports - Development - Issues: feature request: flag/country for incoming calls
- UBports - Development - Issues: SMS not received sometimes
- UBports - Development - Issues: [24.04-1.x] unrenamed "messaging-app" left as a content-hub peer
- UBports - Development - Issues: External Storage app's "Eject" button always says "device busy", even if I just plugged it in
- UBports - Development - Issues: Request for ability to toggle touch-scroll behavior on UT terminal app
- UBports - Development - Issues: File manager gets stuck when transfering large files (>2GB) from flash drive to internal storage
- UBports - Development - Issues: multimedia controls on the lock screen
- #UbuntuTouch: @ati1 Can #flatpaks from #flathub run on #UbuntuTouch? In my experience, #Kasts by KDE works amazingly for pocasts.
Sxmo
Distributions
- @pabloyoyoista: Thought to have some fun programming on a Sunday evening, and ended up polishing some financials plots for postmarketos. Are they easily understandable? Anything else you'd like to see in terms of financial reporting? All the data is from the public API and code is in https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/operations/-/merge_requests/1#financialreporting #postmarketOS #linuxmobile
- postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: postmarketos-duranium/initramfs: add support for immutable images/boot
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: build: Couple crypt_root option to crypt_password (and README updates)
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: rockchip: add dkms and gcc for installing PineTab2 Wi-Fi driver
- Mobian mobian-recipes Issues: The boot partition created by the latest Mobian installer is too small to upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie
- Mobian mobian-recipes Issues: Please consider installing
Recommendsby default for forky - Phoronix: Debian's APT Gaining Built-In History Command
- Phoronix: Fedora Forge Announced For Modernizing Fedora's Development & Collaboration
- Purism: PureOS Crimson: August 2025 – Alpha Released
Apps
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Quadrapassel
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Help
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Inspector
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Mini Text
- #LinuxMobile: The Filmbook app has been lacking a proper icon for too long, but @nido@troet.cafe has stepped up to tackle this challenge! He's created two fantastic design options, and I honestly can't decide between them.That's where you come in – I'd love your help in choosing the best one! Please boost this post and vote for whichever icon you think works best for the app.Your feedback means a lot! 📱✨More about the Filmbook app can be found here: https://flathub.org/en/apps/page.codeberg.bjawebos.Filmbook#filmbook #linux #linuxmobile #libadwaita"Folder": A book/folder with a film negative peeking out"Camera": A camera with a film holder on the back
- tbernard: "Mahjongg was accepted into Circle! 🀄🀄🀄It's one the historical GNOME games, but thanks to Mat's modernization work over the past few cycles it looks very fresh and clean nowadays. Welcome :)https://apps.gnome.org/Mahjongg#gnome #circle #libadwaita"
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH 00/10] ARM: Add support for yarisxl mt6582 board
- phone-devel: [PATCH v2 0/8] media: i2c: dw9719: add DT compatible and DW9718S support
Stack
- Phoronix: Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Driver Tackles OpenGL Mesh Shaders
- servo: "In 2025 we already have more PRs merged than in the whole of 2024!2024 PRs: 1,7712025 PRs: 1,983 *At the last count of the data this month."
- Phoronix: Mesa Adds Contributor Guidelines - Will Allow AI Generated Code If Author Understands It
- Phoronix: PCIe 8.0 v0.3 Specification Released To Members
- Phoronix: Git Developers Debate Making Rust Mandatory
- Phoronix: Linux 6.17 File-System Benchmarks, Including OpenZFS & Bcachefs
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-09-19
- Matrix.org: Matrix v1.16 release
Thanks
Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.
Something missing? Want to contribute?
If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please just put it into the hedgedoc pad for the next one! Since I am collecting many things there, this get's you early access if you will ;-) If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!